Pride In The Name

The more you learn about the life and times of Holly Golightly – muse of Billy Childish, “mate of Jack White’s”, creator of skiffle-girl-group-blues-country-pop gem Truly She Is None Other – the more amazing she gets.

She was named after Truman Capote’s best heroine, raised by artist parents, and had already left home to live with a boyfriend at fifteen: it was then that she met artist/musician/all-round provocateur Billy Childish and formed The Headcoatees, sister group to his own Thee Headcoats. “Well, he approached me,” Holly says, a bit shyly. “You know. I’d been seeing him at gigs for years. I kind of wasn’t your average fifteen-year-old.”
Possibly not: among other things, she lived on a houseboat on the river Medway for about half of her life. “And now,” says Holly conversationally, “I live somewhere where, for the first time in my life, I have central heating.” Holly’s bright South Downs chirrup – all ringing vowels and crisp Eliza Doolittle enunciations – drops to a conspiratorial whisper. “And I don’t use it. Cos I hate it. Cos I’m so used to building a fire. I’m so not used to, like, flicking a switch, and the air being all dry. I can’t stand it. So I’m sitting here now,” she giggles down the phone line, “with everything open. All my windows are constantly open, even in the middle of winter. Cos I’m so used to living outside.”
Holly’s one of the most fearsomely prolific musicians we can think of, having produced eleven solo albums, several collaboration projects and a DJ-box full of singles – and having done several US tours a year – since ’95, all the while holding down a full-time job as a housing officer in London. “I like to tour on my own,” Holly reckons. “I have loads of people in the US I can play with, depending on what city I’m in. It’s kind of in the tradition of old blues and country singers – they’d just travel around with their guitar, pick up a band in town, and go.”
Her passion for old blues and country, and for early rock’n’roll – primarily British Invasion rock and northern soul – started when she was about ten, when she began collecting rare singles and (a bit later) going to Northern soul clubs to dance. She ultimately became a musician simply out of a desire, Holly explains, “to make the kind of records that I would want to dance to.” She also relishes putting a female twist on that era’s hormonally charged, male-driven rock music – and resultantly, Truly… has a kind of early-’60s girl-group duality: flirtily innocent on the one hand, and sexed-up/deathly serious on the other.
“That’s something that interests me a lot,” agrees Holly, pleased. “Well, everyone knows what they got it for, don’t they? I love that idea: that, you know, there’s nothing more dangerous than a teenage girl.”

She is on Sympathy For The Record Industry in the US, the label the White Stripes were on prior to signing with XL; hence the now-famous collaboration that Shot Her, as happens in all good clichés, To Fame. “‘It’s True That We Love One Another’ was just supposed to be a test track,” Holly explains. “They had a few days in London and just wanted to see how Toerag [Studios, where the Stripes ultimately recorded Elephant] sounded. I didn’t know they were going to release it, until they had.”
So, all things considered, it’s easy to see why suddenly being the New Ace Face du jour in seemingly every music and style rag over the last two months is probably not, relatively speaking, that big a deal (“It’s nice to be a bit busier,” Holly says philosophically, “but at this point, I feel like I’ve been doing two full-time jobs for ages anyway”) – and it’s easy to imagine that the independent-minded, life’s-what-you-make-it Holly Golightly might be the most aptly named person in the world.
“Oh, my mum was trying to get me to read it for years,” says Holly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “You know, (instructive parental voice) ‘This is who you’re named after. You should read this.’ She bought it for me for a couple of Christmases, or a couple of birthdays, but for years it just ended up by the bye. Growing up with my name was… not that easy.” She laughs extravagantly. “Holly was weird enough, and I never used Golightly, ‘cos needless to say, I’d have just got my head kicked in at school. But when I finally read it, when I was about 14 or 15 – I’d skimmed through it before, but I didn’t get the grasp of the story until then - then I felt, ‘Yeah. I’m quite proud that I’ve got that name, actually’.”

Truly She Is None Other is out now on Damaged Goods